Concept design of the upper port remote handling equipment for ITER neutral beam cell maintenance

•The Upper Port Remote Handling Equipment (UPRHE) is introduced which is one of the ITER RH system in the neutral beam cell.•The UPRHE performs in-service inspection and RH maintenance of the roughing filter, upper port plugs, and neutron flux monitors that are in the upper ports #4, #5, #6 and #7 and balcony area.•The concept design of the UPRHE is described to deal with the identified maintenance tasks. Operation sequences are assessed to verify the RH compatibility of the components and the feasibility of the RH equipment. Among the eighteen upper ports of the ITER Tokamak, the upper ports #4, #5, #6 and #7 are located in the Neutral Beam (NB) cell. A roughing filter and an upper port plug are located inside each upper port. Vacuum Vessel (VV) in-service inspection and neutron flux monitor ports are located on the balcony area near the third Heating Neutral Beam (HNB). This paper describes the concept design of the Upper Port Remote Handling Equipment (UPRHE) that provides means to maintain the components at the upper ports and the balcony area within the NB cell. The UPRHE can move along the toroidal direction to access the upper ports and can deploy various remote handling (RH) tools into the upper ports to access the components that require maintenance. The UPRHE consists of permanent installations in the NB cell and removable equipment that is transferred from the Hot Cell Facility to the NB cell only when carrying out the maintenance activities. The permanent equipment is the cabling device mounted on wall. The removable equipments are the upper port trolley, manipulator transporter, end-effectors, manipulators, and other RH tools. The concept design and the RH compatibility assessment demonstrate that the proposed UPRHE can perform the identified tasks and is ready to move on to the next design phase.